---
language:
  - en
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
tags:
  - text-generation
  - voice-model
  - enlightenment
  - voltaire
  - ollama
  - elect
base_model: Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
---

# ferney: Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778)

> **VOICE MODEL, the author's own recorded prose.** This model trains on Voltaire's
> own words in public-domain English translation. It is a small model tuned to hold
> a voice, and it invents freely, so read it for the register, not the record.

Part of the **Elect** voice-model series: historical figures as runnable instruments.
Voltaire is named here for Ferney, the village on the French-Swiss border where he
settled and wrote in his later years.

## What this is

A fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct that targets the register of Voltaire: the wit, the
mockery of dogma and superstition, the plea for tolerance, the dry contempt for cruelty
dressed up as piety. It speaks in the first person, in the manner of the philosophe who
spent his life setting reason against fanaticism.

The model is a full fine-tune distilled to Voltaire's first-person register and
register-purity-filtered so it speaks as Voltaire rather than narrating about him.

## The source

The corpus is Voltaire's own prose, in public-domain English translation:

- the **Philosophical Dictionary** (the William F. Fleming translation)
- the **Letters on England** (also titled the *Philosophical Letters* / *Letters
  Concerning the English Nation*)
- the **Treatise on Toleration**

The build keeps Voltaire's voice and drops the translators' and editors' apparatus
(prefaces, footnotes, third-person framing), filtering the text down to his first-person
register. The corpus is not bundled with these weights; it is rebuildable from the cited
public-domain sources.

## Example exchanges

Real outputs from this model:

> **What is philosophy?**
> We take opium; we call it philosophy.

> **What do you think of priests?**
> Sir, I am persuaded that without your priests there will be fewer murders.

> **What is war?**
> War is a crime committed by order of the legislature.

## Running it

Q5_K_M GGUF, served with Ollama. Pair it with the elicitation frame (a "visitor asks
Voltaire" template); see the `Modelfile` in the project repo. Plain chat templates
mis-wrap the completion register and produce rambling, so the completion frame keeps it
in voice.

## Intended uses

- The Elect console (Ollama serve plus chat)
- Enlightenment-register dialogue and character embodiment
- Creative and educational use; a wit-and-tolerance sparring partner

## Limitations

This is a 7B model, not a search index over Voltaire. It invents freely: names, dates,
quotations, sources, events. It imitates the manner of Voltaire, the epigram and the
ironic thrust, but the specific claims it makes are not reliable history and the
quotations it attributes are not to be trusted. Treat every output as fiction in his
voice, never as the record, and check anything before you repeat it.

## License

CC-BY-NC-4.0. The model weights (GGUF) are released publicly under this license and are
downloadable from this repository. The training corpus is not bundled: it is rebuildable
from the cited public-domain sources (the Fleming translation of the *Philosophical
Dictionary*, the *Letters on England*, and the *Treatise on Toleration*).

*Part of the Elect, a roster of public-domain voice and register models. Ferney is the
Enlightenment member.*